It's not the West as a whole, it's a specific group of MBA-types which hijacked many institutions. We know where the problem is coming from. We have enough people who want to do stuff like building planes properly. The next step is to make domain knowledge mandatory for leadership roles.

We also have the same issue in politics and journalism: People with lightweight backgrounds making big decisions/observations/conclusions that actually require domain expertise.

Those MBA types you’re talking about is what got Boeing to the problems it has now, and it took them quite a while to get there.

The West path I’m talking about is much more recent, it’s gonna still take a while.

Exactly.

In my work as a senior software engineer, half of my work is to write some “popular science” versions of documents to educate the leadership. I have to over simplify the system to fit into their needs. It seems to me they don’t have the patience to understand some real complexity of the system, or even don’t have the curiosity to.

They looks more like business man too me, instead of their title as software engineer director.

No those MBAs are just servants. It is the shareholders. And it is not only Boeing that has this problem. Investors want the line to go up and everything else be damned. And humans are exceptionally bad at long term planning.

What cultures do you think prioritize the truth?

The cultures that focus on performance. Just like the West did in the past. Now, with DEI/woke agendas, the focus is definitely on something else, especially in academia.

Boeing’s problems have nothing to do with DEI.

That’s not to say that some, not all, of DEI implementations aren’t stoopid, but it is just absolutely not what’s going on at Boeing.

And also, you didn’t answer what the truth seeking cultures are if not the educated liberal democracies.

Boeing was about not prioritizing the right thing, short term thinking and not prioritizing the truth. It took long, but it there we are.

Let’s agree to disagree on what my prior answer contains.

DEI does to society what the penny pushers at Boeing did to their business: chasing the wrong objectives in search of some theoretical goal leads both to ruin. If any DEI implementation is not 'stoopid' that is only by happenstance, not due to some kernel of truth lurking behind the discriminatory revolutionary synthetic-society ideological hodgepodge that DEI is. There is no truth to be had there, only ideology.

The Ideology is common people having baked in prejeduces, not becoming aware of them, and I'm continuously baffled how so many people on HN can't see beyond their own default view.

The other Ideology is DEI usually being a pet project in corporate, more there to use for PR than to enact real change. HR will always reserve the right to fuck you over with all means available, and if that includes your race, gender or religion, they'll happily use that. This is a good extreme example: https://fandomwire.com/transgender-former-bethesda-employee-...

The fundamental observation that many kinds of prejudices that continue for generations create lasting harm for those that have been prejudiced against and their descendants is kind of self-evident.

The “woke” or DEI mindset is as far as I can tell, in origin basically about acknowledging that.

Then all sorts of things, including social media pressures, combined with grievance and resentment have led people really far astray in their attempts to “make things right”.

So I understand the visceral reaction the words can cause for some people, and partly agree.

However, the underlying observation is true, and if one for example were looking for a candidate and would, inspired by this observation, spend extra effort to advertise to certain groups, then that would be a pretty sensible DEI implementation.

Any sort of relaxed standards or claims that math is racist or something is bad however. Racial or gender quotas are also dangerous, if they’re used it needs to be very careful and temporary.

I do feel that while this sort of stupid stuff obviously happens, is discriminatory and very bad, and should be stopped, it is probably being blown out of proportion as part of a bigger political fight.

Sounds like nostalgia for a past that never was to me. Like a presidential slogan even.

Not sure how you could think that the ongoing Boeing situation or the way of the New West has to do with nostalgia of the past.

If you mean that focusing on the truly important things is about nostalgia, so be it.

No, the notion that the culture shift at Boeing is an indication of general "western decline" and that such things didn't happen 20-50 years ago, and that we just need to rid ourselves of bad influences (like the person above me getting upset about DEI, despite no link to current issues as Boeing) to become great again.

Incidentally, this is a popular narrative in fascist regimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenesis#Politics_and_hist...

I get the feeling you misunderstood my point.